Tax Fraud and other Heretical Blasphemies
by WkCIA
Summary: Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor and fully qualified Tax Accountant and Auditor Alera Jumil and her associates continue to sweep his Divine Majesty's Imperium, finding and liquidating waste, corruption, and traitorous heresy in his name!
1. 1 Nobody Expects

Prologue:_ 983.M41, Adair VI, Obscuras Sector_-

In a spartan but clean room in a residential complex near the local spaceport, a man on the comfortable but sparsely furnished bed in that room sighed with a combination of contentment and sadness. Next to him, a slim form in the bed mumbled something contentedly as she began to rouse.

The man turned to her as her eyes opened. "Something on your mind?" she asked softly, as she noticed the contemplative look on his face.

"Oh, sorry," Imperial Navy Flight Officer Garen Danar replied. "I was just thinking that my shore leave ends in five days."

The woman in the bed stretched slightly. "Still five days to enjoy each other's company," she said, smiling at the thought. "I can still show you around the city... maybe we could find a quiet spot in the Ecclesiarchy cathedral grounds... I know a perfect place I visit when I'm off duty with the Communications Logos..." she trailed off.

"And after that?" Garen said. "After that I fly away and never come back." He stroked her cheek, and she closed her eyes and smiled as she felt his fingers on her skin.

"You know, it doesn't have to be like that," she said.

"What?" The surprise in his voice was obvious.

The woman opened her eyes. "Take me with you." Her voice suddenly gained enthusiasm as she thought about it. "I'm sure your ship needs a communications tech. Take me with you to the stars. You always tell me how beautiful the stars are from space."

Silence greeted her hopeful thought.

"Oh," she said, suddenly chastened. She seemed to shrink slightly away from the man. "I'm one of _those_ girls, am I?"

"No!" came the immediate response. "No... it's just that... it's dangerous up there. You aren't used to living in space, or on a ship. You're not used to having to live with the same people day in, day out, for years at a time. Adair is..." he looked out the window, to see the still mostly untouched landscape of the agri-world stretch out into space to the horizon. "Adair is a paradise. You'll be far happier here. You _like_ the space, and the sky, and the ground beneath your feet."

The girl in the bed nodded sadly, seeing the logic in his words. Then she brightened. "Well, we have five days left. No use moping." She silenced the man's melancholy reverie with a tickle, and a long kiss on the lips.

Five days later, Garen Danar kissed Raelin Clarinel for a long time, clasped a dataslate with her picture on it to his heart, and then joined the line of bored looking Navy personnel waiting to be transferred back to the _Dauntless _class light cruiser he called home. The five days he'd had with her were wonderful. It was good to end it on a high note, he thought. No hard feelings. And it was only ten or so more years before he could retire.

"I'll see you again, I promise!" he called out to the girl in the habit of the Adepta Sororitas, waiting with the other people who had come to see off loved ones. "One day I'll have to retire, and I'll come visit!"

The Sororitas smiled and waved back. "I'll look forward to it, Garen!" Her grin spread wider as a thought occurred to her. "But don't expect me to look quite like my data slate picture!" They shared a laugh.

Thinking fondly of her, the pilot turned, entered the personnel shuttle that would take him away from her, and left Adair VI vowing to return one day.

He never did.

You couldn't blame him, really.

Three years later, Adair VI was lost to the Imperium, overrun by the forces of the Chaos Gods.

***

_998.M41, _Fyracus IV, _Obscuras Sector_

The world of machines is a fascinating one. It is not quiet, as what the ignorant would tell you, nor are machines the soulless pieces of material they are sometimes made out to be. Machines have spirits and thoughts and minds. They hum and chatter and throb, and from their metal and electronic innards they help mankind in all their forms to better subdue and control the forces of nature in this cruel, barbaric universe.

Any Mechanicus initiate could tell you that, but for Alera Jumil, Inquisitor of his Divine Majesty's Ordo Hereticus for nearly 110 years, these truths were more self evident than they were to other people who didn't worship the machine god. These, and other, less glamorous and edifying truths, she pried gently from the perfect metal souls that made up the computers and cogitators that served the glory of mankind.

Her eyes were now shifting repeatedly from left to right, scanning lines of blue text that ran across a computer terminal in a fairly well appointed office. The Inquisitor slouched over a sumptuous chair that until recently had been the local Ecclesiarchy Cardinal's, and soon would be again… if she found her quarry and he wasn't it. Her hands were idly thumbing the crystal display, scrolling up and down to see what new truths the computer could find. The Inquisition expected audits of all planetary facilities that comprised the Imperium, the better to find those who had betrayed the trust given to them by the Emperor. The Ordo Hereticus provided them.

The screen suddenly changed into lines of machine code that were unintelligible to one who was not trained in the arts of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Or someone who had spent their lives dedicated to drawing secrets out of machines. "OK, we're in," she remarked casually to the figure sitting placidly on the desk beside her. Alera pulled out a small lead from the terminal's interface and placed it behind her ear, the fingers searching for her machine interface plug. With a small, satisfied click, the wire connected, and the Inquisitor saw- no, _felt_ the surge of information that pulsed through the machine spirit of the Cathedral's computer. Several other thick cables ran from the computer on the Cardinal's desk to the Universal Machine Interface plugged into the top of Magos Ally Danar's head, of the Adeptus Mechanicus. "See if you can't locate some incriminating evidence," the Inquisitor said. The Magos had her scalp plate in her hands, and she was stroking the ceramite strands posing as hair grafted lovingly onto it by herself. Her left eye dilated in and out precisely as a camera's would, as if she was scanning for something that she could find in her mind's eye.

"Yes, Inquisitor," she answered, in a voice that was sweet and warm and probably the most human thing about her. Her interface began to hum softly, as she continued to look straight ahead, as if reading something in the distance.

"I have to ask, Inquisitor. Should I change the cut?"

"Hmmm?" The Inquisitor pursed an eyebrow in slight confusion.

"Oh, the Hair style on my scalp plate, Inquisitor," Ally continued, smiling sheepishly as the display on the Desk continued to scroll down until it became a blur. "I've wanted to change it for a while, and my fleshy darling doesn't mind, but… I'm not sure if I should." Pet names for spouses were never quite as strange as those between the Mechanicus and human.

Alera looked at the scalp plate, which the Magos was still gently fingering. "Well, the Ecclesiarchy texts do quote that in matters of the Matrimonial, a spouse must take the other's wishes into account when making decisions," she said, giving the matter some thought. "But they say nothing of your superior's wishes save his divine Majesty the Emperor and the Ecclesiarchy when it comes to fashion." The Inquisitor noticed something flash on the screen and in her mind. "Wait. Stop." The display of numbers and files slowed, then scrolled back to where the moment the Inquisitor had noticed something.

"You mentioned Incriminating, Inquisitor," Ally smiled. "I didn't think THIS kind of incriminating."

The display now showed a fairly nubile Ecclesiarchy sister disrobing before entering the communal hygiene chambers. Half fascinated and half disturbingly amused, Alera reached out and tapped the terminal's display a few more times, searching for more files. The Cardinal had several folders containing live feeds of the sororitas hygiene chambers.

The Inquisitor smirked slightly, a twitch that twinged the side of her lips up a fraction. "All right, keep searching." The display started to scroll again. "Do you want to tell the Sister Superior, or…"

"I would think I'd rather watch you do it, Inquisitor." The Magos giggled slightly. "I want to record the look on the Cardinal's face." She suddenly frowned, slightly, as something in the data stream caught her attention.

"Now This one might be interesting, Inquisitor," she said, as the terminal flashed a few commands the Magos had input through her mind. It showed a schematic of the Cathedral Complex, which then shifted to the side of the screen as another data window sprung up, filled with financial records. A small section of the schematic then flashed a bright red as Ally flagged it. It was well below any other level of the Cathedral, seemingly connected only by the sewage corridors. "Apparently I have recorded payments from the maintenance ledgers of the local Sororitas Chapter being spent on this area, which hasn't been used in…" Her head began to click softly as one of her internal cogitators strained with the raw data being fed to her of the Cathedral's history. "…twenty seven years." She stopped again. "I am picking up life forms in that room, however, from the Auspex feeds."

The Inquisitor frowned. This was more than simple fraud. "I have a feeling about this. I think I had better tell Garen."

She reached for the communicator strapped to her left wrist.

***

In another part of the Cathedral complex, Imperial Navy Flight Captain Garen Danar stared at his Auspex screen, pointing it at various architectural features. The image of a non descript man, with non descript appearance, he was a perfect Inquisitor's Investigator, someone who aroused no suspicion and hid a ferociously sharp intelligence behind the scruffiness of his appearance. And he could fly a shuttle pretty nicely, too. The sister assigned to him as escort twittered nervously as he abruptly pointed the bulky device in his hands from statue to bust to cornice without performing the required rituals of obeisance. As he moved around, her robes rustled as she hurriedly performed each devotional both for her and for him.

"Sir, this is highly inappropriate," she began, only to be silenced with an urgent Hush from the pilot, who wore his Naval Service cap at the usual rakish angle, the one indication to the outside galaxy that he was not a run of the mill pilot. He tilted the Auspex at a wall and stared intently at the readout.

The sister stared at the wall. It was flat stonemasonry, built several thousand years ago by hardworking servitors and stone smiths. Her interest was piqued for a few seconds as she wondered what is possibly could have been that picked the Captain's interest. Then she waited. And stared at the wall.

The silence reigned for a few seconds more before the sister found the courage to ask what the matter was.

Garen grunted, walked up to the wall, and tapped it eight times with his knuckles, in a staccato, non rhythmic manner. It slid open, revealing a stairway into the darkness below the Cathedral. "Figures," he muttered. He turned to the sister, now looking intrigued at the stairwell and where it might lead to. "You may want to get some Armour on, Ma'am. And bring a squad," he said cheerily, pulling out a communicator from his Navy greatcoat. He was about to tap it when it chirped. He tapped it once and started before he could give the Inquisitor a chance to speak. "Nautasends Rose. Den abounds, darkness or light unknown. Awaiting strength, request?"

"Affirmed," came the response. "Darkness hides, illuminate. Illuminate parameters caution, awaiting strength, awaiting sisters, awaiting Rose." There was a short pause. "Aeronautica sends Nauta love," the Inquisitor said, her voice still deadpan.

Garen Danar laughed.

He figured that was the reason why he would never make Inquisitor.

***

The corridors underneath the Cathedral complex were dank with some sickly smell even worse than the raw sewage which ran down the canals within them. A multitude of light beams attached to consecrated Bolter guns crisscrossed the pitch black walls dripping with condensation as the Inquisitor and her Kill Team inched carefully into the void her Investigator had found.

They were sisters of battle with her, warriors with the unwavering fury of the Emperor and the righteousness that is borne of faith. Clad in black powered armour, the squad meticulously deployed around the Inquisitor and her Investigators, moving for maximum coverage and effect with the silence and assurance born of a thousand drills and many years spent cleansing the heretic. The two leading sisters had flamers. In the closed spaces underneath the Cathedral, they would be sisters of death.

Ally Danar turned to the Inquisitor. "Hear that?" she asked.

The Inquisitor stopped, waited for a moment, hearing nothing but the sounds of dripping water and the local vermin, then touched the comm. bead at her ear. It picked up sound at something of the same level that Ally's mechanical senses could pick up.

"Some sort of… chanting? About 100 metres ahead behind a locked door?" Alera whispered. The Magos nodded.

Within a minute, the entire kill team had set up around the door, which had an odd symbol inscribed on it that made everyone but Ally mildly ill. It was not a good sign.

"Don't tell me we're raiding a Waste Extraction Facility?" whispered Garen as he read the symbol painted on the metal door, in a slightly despairing tone. He did not volunteer for his Majesty's Service with the intent of spending much time near human waste.

"We are raiding a Waste Extraction Facility," answered the Inquisitor. "I want standard protocols as we go in. Don't shoot unless you think it's necessary, and I want survivors." The two sisters with flamers stood back, as two with gas grenades stood up to brace the door, silently extending riot prods from their belts.

The Inquisitor checked her Bolt Pistol one last time, comforted by the reassuring clack of the pins falling into place, and pumped her hand to signal the go. She raised her pistol, and fired two rounds into the lock mechanism. The door slid open.

All hell broke loose.

***

The Inquisitor was expecting some sort of hellish chaos cult and, being mildly psychic and an experienced member of his divine Majesty's Inquisition, she wasn't usually wrong on such things. She wasn't this time, either.

The waste extraction facility was large. It was a square room, with a raised dais and various old sewage processing machines and servitors lying unused where they were abandoned by their previous legitimate owners. The lights were bright and colourful, the air was filled with a soothing, gentle melody, and its occupants… well, they were not abiding by any approved Ecclesiastical Law that Alera could remember. And she could remember a great many things.

The two sisters wielding riot prods stormed into the room and found their naked sisters in battle cavorting in the most unspeakable manner on the floor, which appeared to have had a lush makeover in carpet. Bringing their prods down with far more force than necessary, they dragged two stunned (And twitching) bodies back out, only to be followed by the Inquisitor herself, the Magos, and the as usual scruffily attired Flight Captain and the Kill Team.

It was then that the chanting could be heard. Ululating in high to low, loud to soft, the Inquisitor found it hateful and disturbing and foreign, as did everyone else.

Except Garen. Garen thought it sounded vaguely familiar, although he didn't know quite why.

By then, the other occupants of the room had noticed that someone had barged in on their action. Some had guns, the others their own bodies, and others had improvised weapons. Sisters and priests and laymen of the Cathedral snarled and charged at the Kill team, and bullets and laser beams began to fill the enclosed spaces of the room. Some strange creature charged at the Inquisitor, throwing itself bodily at Alera's face with bone spurs for what used to be hands. Reflexively, the Inquisitor's eyes glowed a bright blue, and the abomination snapped back, as if pushed by some force field surrounding the Inquisitor. The bolt pistol in her hand jerked up, then barked twice. The Inquisitor reached for her back, flipping out a sword encrusted with ancient runes. She waded into the throng of cultists milling about in confusion, her eyes exuding a cyan brilliance as she slashed left and right.

Garen Danar couldn't shake the feeling of familiarity with the chanting going on. He dived behind a set of pipes stretching from floor to ceiling, which had some sort of sumptuous carving engraved into it. He looked around for the source of the chanting. And that hideous smell of human waste combined with some overpowering floral scent even now overpowering his nose.

The sisters, as usual, were killing in the efficient way they had been taught. Two shots in the chest, move on to the next target, two shots. It was an elegant dance of death they wove, swirling in a rustle of robes choreographed in perfect unison. Laser beams and bullets ate into polished armour, but did little to stop them or even knock them out of tempo. One lucky shot punched through the torso armour of a sister, and she allowed herself the luxury of a grimace of pain before she sprawled to the ground. The Investigator remembered the same, sweet girl who was only minutes ago trying desperately to placate the spirits he had disrespected.

Ally wasn't having much fun. Shrugging off the laser fire that was eating slowly into her torso chassis, the engineer's hands retracted into her forearm and came out as riot prods. She wielded them with consummate skill, blocking the majority of the fire coming at her with the charge field at the end of the prods and deftly pushing the heads into exposed cultist flesh. A bolter round smacked into her face, spinning her around with a cry of alarm both from her and her husband until she turned back, now a visage of terror. Where her eye used to be was only the red laser of the range finder for her artificial eye, set hollowly into a skull she had replaced years ago with a molybdenum titanium alloy. It was slightly dented.

Ally swore softly in her sweet, still human voice, and her right hand retracted, coming out of her forearm as a Laspistol. She returned the favour, and unfortunately her target did not have the advantage of an armoured skull.

The chanting continued to gnaw at Garen's mind as he took pot shots into the swirling melee of black clad sister and scantily clad former sister in front of him, trying more to keep the fighters behind cover than score hits. It was then that he noticed her, casually punching her hand through the torso armour of a sister of battle rated to withstand pressures no mortal human, not even the space marines, could physically assert. The Kill team retreated from the terrifying, almost angelic demon being in their midst, firing madly at the woman even now whispering sweet nothings into the ear of the sister she'd just impaled.

Garen Danar felt an even stronger feeling of foreboding dread.

She looked just like any sister of battle, except naked, and this time, with a set of bone spurs that rose out of her back like a grotesque parody of wings. She was the most beautiful creature he had seen in a long time.

"By the Emperor…" he whispered.

The demon withdrew its hand from the sister, clutching a heart that was still beating. The sister didn't look worried. She looked more ecstatic than anything as she slowly sank to the floor, bleeding her lifeblood out into the now lurid red fabric of the carpet. The demon sniffed the air, then smiled, and turned to face the now horrified shuttle pilot.

"Garen!" she squealed, with all the joy of an old friend who has met another after many years. "We meet again!" She held up her hand and _caught_ a spray of bolter shells from the kill team, and then sister Hyrna turned her consecrated, blessed flamer to bear and spat out a line of promethium at the demon. When the flash cleared, a rather blackened woman looked around at herself, thought the scorch highlights flattered her features, and continued to slink over to the pilot, who found he couldn't move. Or think. He desperately tried to get his index finger to close over his laspistol, but it continued to refuse to budge. Sister Hyrna readied the line again, but as she was about to ignite it, a group of cultists in cover put down a withering barrage of fire. A bolter shell punched into Sister Hyrna's shoulder guard, blowing it, and most of her left arm off. With a cry of pain she was wrenched behind cover with the rest of the team.

The beautiful creature continued to slink slowly over to Garen. "Garen, Garen, it's been a long time! My, how I have missed you, my darling," the angelic beast said, her voice infused with delight, somehow resonating in his head. "My, you don't look a day over the last time I met you." Her lips glistened. "What have you been up to? You don't realise it, but I've always wondered what it would be like to make you… well, suffer for me." She smiled, and her slender hand stroked the pilot's cheek gently, in the way that Ally did.

"I'm quite sorry," Garen managed to croak out, a little confused. "I don't think we've met."

The demon smiled. "How could you forget me? I, Sister Raelin?"

Garen pictured her in the habit of the Adepta Sororitas, and it suddenly all made horrible, horrible sense.

And he suddenly realised he was very likely damned.

"Ah," she said, as she saw the light of recognition in his eyes, and bared her fangs with barely controlled rage. "Shore leave girls. You never seem to remember those, do you sailors? One in every port, it seems. But don't you worry, you weren't the worst thing that ever happened to me. You were nice enough not to sell me to the slavers when _they_ came." She punched him in the gut, and he crumpled to the floor, stunned by the force of the blow. She picked him up, her voice now louder. "You were nice enough not to sacrifice me like a fething goat in front of a thousand screaming cultists, as they plucked my heart out and gave it to the Gods." She punched him again, and stars now flashed in front of his eyes as she picked his nearly insensate form up from the ground. Her next words almost came out as a hiss. "You were nice enough not to _take me with you_ _to the stars_."

The pilot grimaced, as waves of guilt washed over him. "Raelin," he managed to squeak. "Please, I am..." he hated having to say this to a Demon, of all things, but he had to say it.

"I'm sorry."

Raelin cocked her head slightly, as if something stirred deep within her. Her eyes almost glowed with a certain sadness.

"You know," she whispered. "You know, I might have once have accepted that." Then she leaned in. "Not any more, of course." The light of sympathy in her eyes faded and died.

A chainsword blade revved harshly as it crashed into Raelin's neck, giving off sparks. The Demon, slightly annoyed, jerked her head back, sending the chainsword flying, stood and turned to face her sudden attacker. Facing her stood Ally, now with most of her robes and outer skin layer peeled off by flame, claw, and laser. Her one human eye closed suspiciously on the demon woman, the laser rangefinder deliberately shining into Raelin's eyes in an attempt to blind her. Her body was ripped and torn in places, the pseudo flesh of her stomach parted to reveal the metal bone structure underneath, various machines under that blinking serenely. Her left hand was a mass of swords, the right jammed by battle damage into her standard hand mode.

"Other woman?" Raelin remarked to the still immobile Investigator.

"No. Wife," Ally said, and picked up a large machete from the floor with her right hand. Raelin gestured at the Magos, expecting her to freeze. The Mechanicus engineer's rangefinder laser dimmed slightly, then flared up again as Ally rained a flurry of blows on the bone winged creature with the power to crack ceramite carapace armour.

Raelin blocked them all with her hands. The chain swords, powered swords, mono bladed edges capable of ripping steel to shreds were blocked by what seemed to be human flesh. The demon laughed. "I can see why you like this one, my dear," she said to Garen, still straining to remove his mental blocks. "You replaced me with a machine, I see. Suits your... sensitivities." She grabbed Ally's right hand and flung her aside like garbage. The engineer hit the wall hard on her neck joints, and her head bent to an obscene angle from her body. She slid down the wall like a sack of bolts and stayed very still.

The rangefinder laser slowly dimmed into nothingness.

"I wouldn't worry too much," Raelin said casually, as she turned back to Garen. "She got to die quickly. But you! Aha, such fun we'll have!" A gentle blue glow suddenly washed over Garen, and he collapsed to the ground, twitching from the strain, but suddenly able to think again. The Demon woman snarled and faced the only human in the room who could match her powers. A sword appeared in her hand, dark with twisted runes in a language which made it hard to think.

The Inquisitor's robes were awash in blood, almost none of it hers. Steam hissed off the sword in her right hand, and smoke from the barrel of her Bolt Pistol. Alera Jumil's eyes glowed azure blue, exuding the full power of an Inquisitor of his Divine Majesty.

"Fight someone who can fight back, chaos scum," she growled.

Garen couldn't exactly remember how the fight went. He knew it was fast. He knew his boss and his wife's murderer fought at psychically enhanced speeds no one could possibly match in sight. Maybe Ally could record it…

A tear came to the pilot's eye.

***

The Inquisitor touched on every single piece of her training, her combat experience, the dirty tricks she'd learnt over a century of serving his Divine Majesty. Her senses approached the supernatural as she let go of her psychic energies, letting them fill her limbs with speed, steel her body, power her muscles beyond any human capacity. She let the heady power flow through her, untapped in this way since several lifetimes ago.

The memories came back with the flow of energy, as it always did when she tapped it.

She had accidentally started an electrical storm over her family's farm after an argument with her betrothed. She had run out into the fields, angry at him for some trivial transgression and at herself for being angry over it. She had hoped it would rain, and it did, an angry nimbus of cloud appearing from a cloudless sky to drench her (and her father's crops) with water. It was just before the Black ships came. Before the strange men asked about what she did with the rain, and about her little tricks she played on her siblings and nieces and nephews with her blue eyes, about the way she could sometimes wish for things and have them come true. They took her away in the night.

She remembered a time when she looked forward to a life being the wife of a man she loved, raising children, maybe starting her own business in the countryside. Of looking up into the sky with her beloved and counting the stars, and knowing that the Lord Emperor always looked out for them. Being happy.

She kept trying to wish herself back into her bed, to wish she was sleeping, that she would wake up to the smell of her mother's cooking in the kitchen for breakfast, a job she would soon have to learn herself. It never happened.

Her blade flicked at inhuman speed, aiming for limb and head and wing, for anything to drown out that old memory, the memory she tried to destroy with intellect and thought and humour and jadedness and the vengeance of justice in his Divine Majesty's name. She roared an inchoate cry of hatred for Chaos, that which had given her the cursed power to use. Her sword crashed again and again on the demon's weapon and deep into Raelin's flesh.

Then she realised she had made a mistake.

The demon blade shattered, and the Inquisitor stumbled forward, unbalanced. She swung desperately backward behind her, but it was too late. The demon gestured with her hand and disappeared, leaving only a puff of smoke and the smell of cordite.

***

Garen Danar saw that azure blade of light hiss as it spilled ruinous ichor from the beautiful demon. He saw that dark blade of evil drip with the mundane red of simple human blood. He saw the rainbow of colours that extended into light colours he could not explain as the two blades met and clashed. All he knew was that when he could move without twitching again, the Inquisitor was beside him, smiling tiredly down at him. Sister Hyrna stood behind her, looking concerned for her charge despite the fact she was missing an arm of her own. He heard some chanting in the background, but this time it was serene and filled him with a sense of peace.

"All right?" Alera asked.

"Ally?" he replied, his lips shaking slightly.

"We don't know, Garen," she said. "The Mechanicus are tough to kill…"

"The Cult?"

"All gone. The priests are exorcising this place as we speak."

"Rae… Raelin?"

The Inquisitor looked even more tired. "I'm… I'm sorry. She got away. But there is some good news…"

"Hey, fleshy Darling. Turn your head left," came a sweet, gentle voice. He did as ordered, and he saw the rather battered head of his wife laying serenely on the floor, sideways. "Like the Inquisitor says," she said, her still intact lips twisting into a smile, "Mechanicus are hard to kill." Her still human eye looked down. "I think it will be a while before I can get back to work, though."

Garen felt a surge of relief flow through him. He was happy. Then guilt, as he wondered why, of all things, he ought to feel happy.

He figured that was why he would never be an Inquisitor.

END


	2. 2 Hammer of Justice

Hammer of Justice

Garen Danar put his wife's head into the chassis sitting on the diagnostic bench in front of him, and made a casual adjustment to one of the fastenings on her neck brace.

Ally Danar cooed, almost giggled slightly as she felt various electrical impulses surge through her body again, which she hadn't felt in a few months. Spending two months attached to a biological machine interface at a Mechanicus facility was not the optimum use of her time.

"The chassis is inefficient," came the voxcoder squawk of the figure in the robes emblazoned with the cog and wheel of the Adeptus Mechanicus. "Defer to your preference, colleague Magos, but insist explanation as to..." he paused to think for a moment for a synonym to _meatbag_ that didn't sound so offensive for a fellow human, before using the Mechanicus official designation for an unaugmented human, "_baseline_'s installation of central processing organ to chassis." Garen could only pick out snippets; it was spoken in Mechanicus machine language, a spurt of static and hissing to someone not trained to understand it. He could only barely hear some of it because of extensive training by his boss, who understood it by virtue of spending an inordinate amount of time conversing with accounting computers in her career.

"It's a little intimate," came the reply, also in Machine. "I wanted fleshy darling to do it." Her body parts twitched slightly as she sent nerve signals to them; satisfied after a few exploratory movements, she shrugged at the one raised eyebrow from her fellow Mechanicus Magos. "My specific designation for the baseline," she clarified, as she moved a few other body parts. "It's irrational, I understand. I think I'm just a little attached to baseline." She smiled, and her hand moved in an oddly mechanical gesture, evocative of a pat on the back. "I envy you, Magos Casterman, as illogical as that is itself. I don't think I'll ever quite rise above my current rank due to my failings."

The reply was not unsympathetic. "At least you recognise it, colleague Magos. The Omnissiah does not put us here without challenges to face and overcome. I am sure you will too, someday." He switched suddenly to Low Gothic, and turned to Garen. "You are no longer required to remain here," he said, the sound from his artificial voicebox tinny and harsh. "Magos Danar will take approximately 34 hours to complete assembly. She will join you then under her own power."

Had the construct on the bench been anyone else, Garen would have gagged had when he entered the room. It was strewn with mechanical parts, vats filled with organs and other odd fluids, and odd stains on the floor. His wife's body was still not covered with synthetic flesh, and inside her metal frame, set next to the mass of cogitators and motors and other mechanical devices, were the newly installed rudiments of a human body's organs, vat and clone grown. They glistened wetly as the Magos turned on the mechanical heart that was set at her chest. It would have been a horror to anyone else.

To him, it was a gladdening sight.

When he had left, Magos Casterman turned back to his patient. "Is that why you insist on biological organs? To retain similarity to baselines? I find some baselines find that comforting."

"No," she said, in Low Gothic. "Well, maybe. A little." Her voice was sweet; gentle; _real_. It was her voice, and always had been her voice. She couldn't quite bear to part with it, and so couldn't quite bear with parting with the biological organs that kept it alive. But what was the point of doing that if she couldn't feel him kiss her? Couldn't share the food he ate? Couldn't...

"Ah. You are married. I presume he does not have access to a Mechanicus procreation apparatus."

Ally Danar just smiled cryptically at Casterman as he returned to his work.

***

Inquisitor Alera Jumil reached for the cup of _Ulara_ tea she always kept by her side, and took a sip as her practiced eye danced down the columns of figures in the data slate in front of her. The heady brew almost jolted her awake, but she felt fatigue clamp down again upon her mind.

And, for the first time in nearly hundred and thirty years in the Emperor's service, she was stumped.

The figures all added up. Everything added perfectly. There were no errors that she could see, and the checksums for the data all checked out.

_Then why was this planet haemorrhaging funds?_

Inflation had hit record levels due to unsanctioned credits appearing in the economy, a black market was thriving from the loss of confidence in the official imperial credit, and, as much as she had originally suspected the local planetary governors had simply let fiscal discipline lapse, she couldn't, after _extensive_ interviews, come to that conclusion.

The Planetary governors had been fighting this black hole in revenue for nearly a decade before she arrived, and it had only been getting worse. In fact, they themselves had asked for the Imperium's aid.

She put the data slate down, looked up, and shook her head, trying to clear it. She got up from her desk and stretched out, yawning slightly. She looked at herself in the mirror in her quarters; saw the frazzled look of her snow white hair; the dullness of her dark features. The investigation was not helping with her appearance.

Her investigation into the local ecclesiarchy had not recovered anywhere near the amount of money that would explain the problems with the planet's economy, and she was further hampered by the newly withdrawn nature of her Investigator and the repair of her main machine auditor.

She checked her chronometer and sighed. There was, at least, something she could do in the meantime.

***

Garen Danar heard her deceptively heavy footsteps on the floor behind him, and he smiled.

"How do I look?" came the voice, just as he remembered it. He turned around, and...

Ally was dressed in Mechanicus robes, her form beneath clothed in synthetic flesh, except for her hands, which she had always kept open so she could change their configuration to whatever tools she wanted at the time. She was beautiful. Her face was just as he remembered it, and he began to smile. And then he saw it.

Her hair...

She looked just like a woman he had, until recently, thought he'd never see again. And having seen her again, had wished he hadn't.

Ally must have noticed, for a look of concern crossed her face. "You don't like the scalp plate?" She ran a hand through it. "We discussed it, remember? You said you didn't mind, but I remember you liked long hair; it gave you something to play with..." She trailed off as she realised she was beginning to babble most unbecomingly of a servant of the Omnissiah. Then realisation hit her as one of her internal cogitators recognised other people who had the same hair style.

"Oh," she said. Silence reigned in the room for a good few long moments.

"Maybe I should change it," she finally stammered, caught between a most illogical shame, jealousy, and anger, but her husband gently placed his finger on her lips, hushing her. He hugged her.

"What was the ecclesiastical ruling about spouses?" he asked, already knowing the answer. "It's all right, Ally. The only question I want to ask is... do you want it?"

The woman in his arms spoke softly. "Yes." She almost seemed to press into him more deeply. "For the first time in..." she began to click as a cogitator went to work, "nearly eight years... I've wanted to... be more bas... human." The tech priest in her railed at her weakness. She suddenly pushed away from her husband.

"And suddenly, as I'm degrading myself to Baseline, all I can do is remind you of another woman you've had? The same one who nearly disassembled me?" She tore off the scalp plate, leaving her machine interface open to the air. "I don't need this. I really don't. I'm changing it."

Ally Danar stormed off, her feet clanking as loudly as she could possibly make them.

***

"All Rise."

Alera, dressed in the peaked cap and severe uniform of the Imperium's Judicial officers, strode purposefully into the court room in the local administratum chambers. Courts had not changed very much in the many years of humanity's existence, and so its layout had almost been etched into a racial memory- a high, elevated space for the judge, space for the judge's helpers, space for advocates in front of the judge and looking up to him, and an area, guarded, to keep the accused. As one, the humans who could do so stood; officials, administratum archivists, the advocates. The guards and the shadowy figure on the dock stayed still.

The inquisitor moved to the centre of the judge's bench, sat down, and quickly punched in a series of codes and commands into the cogitator set into the structure's surface. She turned to the Servitor who had announced her and whispered into its ear.

The construct turned to the assembled crowd and spoke in its usual programmed monotone.

"Court is in Session. Parameters: Inquisitorial; Jurisdiction: Ordo Hereticus; Alera Jumil presiding. All may sit but the prisoner and guards. The Emperor protects."

As the bustle in the court room settled down, Alera settled herself in her judicial throne and lay back into its rather comfortable upholstery.

"Since we've only got one case today, could I get mentions?"

One of the men sitting at the bar table below her stood up. "Your Worship. Talyn Tanendar for the Inquisition... uh, local inquisition." When she nodded, he sat down, and the man next to him stood up. "Harland Ghasi, for the Ecclesiarchy." He remained standing, and took a sheaf of data slates from the bar table in front of him. "After some consideration, the prisoner has repented, pleads guilty, and requests absolution." He motioned to the slates. "The details of the interrogations, charges, allegations, those confessed to, and those corroborated by external factual evidence are here."

The other advocate stood up. "I've had a few para-advocate trainees and an arbites officer check the data the counsel for the prisoner has given us, Your worship. We're not going to dispute what counsel for the ecclesiarchy has found."

Alera raised an eyebrow, and looked quickly to the prisoner in the dock. The figure was slouched, almost trying to hide while standing. She was pretty sure how the ecclesiarchy had managed to get a confession, but it was legal. This was, after all, heresy, not some minor crime.

"Very well, then." She punched some commands into the data slate in front of her. "The prisoner, Lena Fyrovski, has pleaded guilty to heresy and has fully recanted her beliefs. Just for the record," and now she spoke to the servitor, "Could Mr Ghasi kindly pass up the documents concerning her crimes?"

The advocate in Ecclesiarchy robes handed the pile of slates to the robot, who swivelled and placed them in front of Alera.

The data slates detailed a dossier on the prisoner. A sister of the Adepta Sororitas, a battle sister, even. A glowing record marred after a journey mandated by her abbot for a pilgrimmage to a shrine world in Pacificus sector. A litany of crimes accused of after her fall; the crimes she confessed to, a longer list; crimes provable with outside evidence, a smaller list detailing her acts in the battle underneath the Ecclesiarchy cathedral.

By far the longest list was the list of crimes proven.

"Advocate Tanendar," Alera commented somewhat drily, "This does look a little like a whitewash." She looked up at the man. "What if I happen to find a crime on this proven list that wasn't committed by the prisoner? Where would the perpetrator of _that_ crime be?"

The inquisitorial advocate shrugged sheepishly. "Your worship, I truly apologize. Our local planetary inquisition doesn't have the resources to fully discover the truth behind every act of heresy, but we do make sure that at least the suspect is guilty of _one_ proven crime."

"I am guilty," came a voice. It was feminine, soft, gentle. The crowd in the court room was stunned silent by that admission, by that voice. As one, they turned to the sister in the dock, a cowl over her head, her arms shackled, and the occasional muscle tic that came from overlong stimulation by painstick convulsing her body.

"The prisoner was not given leave to speak..." started Ghasi, the advocate for Ecclesiarchy, but Alera quietened him with a motion of her hand.

"You admit to these crimes?" the Inquisitor asked, not unkindly.

"Yes, Inquisitor," came the soft reply. "All of them." The head in the cowl sank even deeper in its shame.

"You'll submit to Inquisitorial questioning to prove that?" She saw the girl tremble a little more, and she felt some pity for the sister, who until recently had been a model citizen. Even had she told an Inquisitor everything under questioning, they would have to torture her lightly to make sure her answers corroborated.

The prisoner in the dock took a breath. "Yes, My Lady. Such things I must endure are just."

Alera felt she had excellent chances for rehabilitation in the sight of the God Emperor. She knew all her other Inquisitorial colleagues derided her as an overly merciful softie, but there had been an odd light in her Inquisitor mentor's eyes when he reviewed her cases and recommendations for punishment. Her stance in class had been granite. _If I'm going to send a fellow repentant human to the Emperor's throne in a state of grace, the least I can do is make sure I do it painlessly. _It had been one of understanding.

"Well said, prisoner," Alera replied. "Any last words before I pass sentence?"

"I re-embrace the Emperor's light and I shall hope that my scourging and death in punishment would be enough to please him. I renounce the Chaos Gods..."

It was then that one of the administratum clerks archiving the event for local video consumption in the room screamed "TRAITOR TO THE TRUE EMPEROR! This was your chance for Martyrdom!" and took out what seemed to be a locally made autopistol.

Before a quick thinking guardsman had drilled two precise lasgun holes through the clerk's chest, he had managed to empty the gun's magazine into the cowled figure in the stand.

***

Alera found her Investigator disassembling and cleaning his laspistol in the hangar bay where they had parked their shuttle. She pulled over a maintenance crate to the makeshift table he had made himself from other crates, sat down heavily, and pulled out a Lho stick. Her eyes lit up briefly, and a flame appeared at the end of the stick. She puffed deeply.

"Tough day, Ma'am?" asked the Investigator, raising an eyebrow at his boss' uncharacteristically self- harming behaviour.

"Old habit I kicked before I met you. At least I can burn something today," the Inquisitor grunted, looking down at Garen's swift, practiced movements as he disassembled the pistol, wiped it down, and reassembled it, only to repeat the process. He wasn't even looking at his handiwork.

"I heard about what happened today," remarked the pilot, still not looking at the pistol in his hands. "Decided to take a walk into the streets, headed into a local pub. Went out all across the local holonet."

"That bad, huh?" Alera's mouth twisted into a slight grimace. She wasn't just talking about the holonet. She'd just been with Ally, who had, in rather colourful terms, explained why Garen had decided to take a walk into streets filled with gangsters and other criminals. They were less fearsome than Ally was at that moment.

"Oh, not really," Garen replied. He looked back to his hands now, not really looking at the complicated motions he had drilled into himself over nearly thirty years in the Emperor's service. "General consensus amongst the population is that the ruinous powers are bad, that poor girl ought to survive to be given the Emperor's absolution, and the ecclesiarchy's whipped them into a frenzy of devotion against traitors."

"That bad, huh?" Alera smiled, having been caught up in any dozens of civil tumult that heralded an invasion by the forces of Chaos. The paranoia, devotional frenzy (spent not doing work) and inevitable killings of innocent servants of the Emperor were only one of the many methods the Dark Powers had to use.

"Think of it this way, Ma'am," Garen continued. "She could have gone on a rant about how the False Emperor was going to be overtaken by the glory of the eight-starred lords of the eye and started an entire planetary insurrection." He shrugged non-committally. "I mean, from that angle, yes, what happened wasn't so bad."

The Inquisitor nodded. The Lho stick flared as she took a deep puff from it.

Her Investigator paused for a moment. "How is she, by the way?"

"She's still irrationally angry with you and hates the fact that she's being irrational about it. She's threatened to undergo the rite of pure thought about once every fifteen minutes that I've been with her, and she's probably going to chicken out when she realises you're both being immature children."

Garen didn't say anything, while the rhythm of his cleaning increased; a sure sign of repressed depression, which made Alera suddenly realise he wasn't talking about her. She slapped herself mentally for being an idiot.

"Your wife's looking at her now, not the Medicae. Too injured to save normally. She's brought in Casterman; he's a mechanics expert. She's more of a computer hacker."

Garen shook his head slightly, as if to clear it. "But weren't you going to sentence her to death anyway?"

"I was. Lasgun through the heart. Clean, mostly painless."

"And the reason you're not?"

"I'll show you. But first," and she took out a data slate from her coat pocket as she ground the Lho stick into the crate she was sitting on, extinguishing it, "find me something." She threw it into the pilot's lap. "It's a list of various black market arms dealers the local inquisition's managed to get a hold of. I need their transactions over the past three years."

***

Alera Jumil was half-heartedly reconsidering her mercy.

"Emperor damned Fething 'gDargark!" she yelled at the engine assembly which was spewing year old engine oil into her face, as she banged a hydro spanner against the intake valves in a desperate attempt to stop the flow of reeking liquid.

The row caught the quick attention of the woman in Mechanicus robes perched on top of the machine. Sighing a sigh of amused exasperation, the Magos looked intently at her hands. The various diagnostic tools they currently were folded neatly into what looked like a pair of metallic gloves, and then folded again into various metallic tendrils, which snaked their way to the stricken inquisitor and quickly applied the appropriate pressure to the right points.

The flow of oil slowed to a trickle, and then into nothing. The now fairly darkly stained Inquisitor slid out from under the assembly, gathered herself up with as much dignity as she could muster, and kicked the large box attached to the engine at about waist level as hard as she could with her steel capped boots. A quickly spreading pool of ooze eased from underneath it, almost as an ironic retort.

The Box buzzed several times. The Engineer perched on top of it smiled. She knew what that would get in response. Her boss knew more than enough machine language to understand what the buzzing meant.

"You better damn well be penitent, you sorry excuse for a Sister!" yelled the Inquisitor. "Gah! You, you…" The Inquisitor expressed her inexpressible sentiment with another forceful kick to the sarcophagus that housed the person who, a scant few hours ago, was a fully functional human being. The sarcophagus was mounted on a blocky figure, sitting on squat legs powered by hydraulics and with the gentle hum of a fusion generator on the back, cooled by the oil even now seeping into an ever widening puddle on the hard, metal floor of the hangar they were in. A multitude of weapons systems lay around the large, robot like figure, waiting to be installed.

A dreadnought was a dreadful thing of beauty.

The Magos spoke gently, as she always did. "Inquisitor, may I suggest that she be left with me?" She clambered down from the Sarcophagus she was sitting on and landed with a thump that did not befit a person of her apparent weight. She shifted her uniform robes with hands that no longer were a mass of mechanical tendrils. The Inquisitor's wrist chirped. She looked down at it, noted something, then back up. She growled in affirmation. As the Inquisitor stalked off, Ally hooked her robe's sleeve around her hand and began to gently buff the dreadnought, cooing a few soft words of assurance to the hulking machine.

The Inquisitor avoided a few Ecclesiarchy mechanics going about their business on the hangar floor and stared stares of death at the initiates who had gathered to watch the spectacle of the dreadnought being re-armed, who fled with a strong sense of self preservation from her baleful visage. A few servitors doing the rounds twitted nervously as she approached, but the Inquisitor ignored them and found herself a quiet alcove behind some packing crates. She thumbed the communicator. The sight of a rather non-committal man in non-committal clothes appeared in a holoprojection from the communicator. He started to speak.

"Ma'am, I've got…" A quizzical look began to form on his face as he suddenly caught sight of the inquisitor's soaked visage.

The Inquisitor's eyes began to glow a bright, azure blue.

"..um, yes," Danar stammered, quickly looking away at his immediate employer. "I've got a possible explanation as to why money keeps appearing from nowhere."

"Have you got the evidence?" the Inquisitor asked. Her eyes glowed a slightly less bright blue, and small globules of oil began to detach themselves from her face and clothes. They suspended themselves in mid air, forming into a floating glob of engine oil. "I need to look at it before I can start any proceedings, Mr Danar."

The man lifted up a datapad. "Yes Ma'am, I've gotten the purchase orders for ordnance here, and the various bits of evidence I could get. Wasn't too hard to pry out where the cash was being spent in the black market." The Imperial Navy Flight Captain put a certain tone into that last statement that anyone else would have dismissed, but the Inquisitor picked up on it.

"Don't tell me you got into another bar fight looking for dodgy information sources?" she asked, half smiling. The globe of oil grew, as the splatters of black began to detach themselves from her face, revealing artificially rejuvenated skin that made her look no older than when she first joined the Inquisition's ranks as an Investigator, so long ago. "And let me guess… you pretty much beat the information out of the people who didn't immediately tell you when asked or weren't your contacts, right?"

Garen ignored the question. "I'll upload them to you now, Ma'am."

The Inquisitor's communicator chirped again. She thumbed her watch, and another holographic display sprang up, shifting the display of her pilot to the side.

"Explain the figures to me, Mr Danar," Alera said, looking intently through the lists of figures that scrolled down the display in ghostly green text.

"'l'll put up the two sets of ledgers; one is the set we've had given to us by the authorities; the other is my black market list."

The numbers looked normal, and they all added up. For some reason, however, the money siphoned off to pay for arms didn't correspond to any of the voluminous financial data in the official records; an impossibility, for even laundered Imperial credits had checksums and data parameters to compare and account for.

"Here's the trick," Garen said, and suddenly the tables shifted as he input some commands, "of increasing the decimal places to less than usable sums. I think you'll get it immediately."

The Inquisitor flicked her eye over to the figures. One of them in the debit column had a .000001 Imperial credit variance with the credit column, another, a .00000000001 variance, and in all of these the computer machine spirit had rounded it down so it appeared that they were the same. It was standard practice, and the missing variances usually disappeared into a fiscal void. But here…

"They've been adding the variances into their own accounts, Ma'am, before they're rounded up or down by the accounting program."

"I assume this account program deals with several million transactions a day?"

"Yes Ma'am. This account is the Local Administratum accounts database, dealing with all PDF, Guard, Navy and Mechanicus requisitions and payments for the entire sector. I've also got accounts from all the major financial institutions and trading Great houses that base themselves here that show the same exploit, and even one for the Ecclesiarchy Tithes Bank."

"They're stealing off even the citizens savings accounts?"

"Afraid so, Ma'am. Several million credits a day, I think." He paused, to let that sink in. "Completely untraceable, completely unaccountable, and no legitimate government financial computer can moderate the local economy to account for their existence on the market." His image punched a few commands into his wrist comm. "The weapons funds have been traced, so we do know where that comes from."

Alera chuckled. "I have to give this to them," she said. "This is brilliant."

"How did you know to check?" Garen asked.

"Easy. Our penitent sister told me that her cult leaders said something about conjuring money from thin air to feed the masses and feed the wrath of their righteous fury." She cocked her head and smiled. "And I haven't been auditing accounts for a hundred years to not know that weapons merchants since time immemorial have always demanded decent accounting of their revenue."

"So where is she?"

The Inquisitor gestured behind her, to the behemoth now gently moving its servo motors as it tested its joints, Ally holding it upright with hands now formed into mechandrites.

"Penitent Engine. She wanted her revenge in the Emperor's name, and I felt it was right to give it to her. It's official name is the _Perdition to Traitors_, but I think I like "Lena" better."

***

Sister Superior Rykan settled into her small private chapel and began to pray.

It brought her a great deal of spiritual comfort, but the prayers she was uttering would have brought great unease to almost anyone who had heard them. Her chapel, which only her personally programmed servitors were allowed to enter, had ornaments and holy objects that almost anyone else would have found greatly disturbing.

A sudden ecstasy began to overtake her as her prayers continued, as her voice began to utter in a wild cacophony of different tongues, explaining and debating plots; some praising her for her deflection plan to the Slaneeshi cult in her cathedral, others warning against its success, urging a widening of the bugs and hacks she had placed all those years ago in the planet's financial computers, to continue aiding and supplying the cells of cultists she had planted throughout the planet; perhaps even necessarily seducing the senile old Cardinal even now probably watching the Sororitas hygiene chambers video feeds she hade made insultingly easy to find. The voices continued to plot as her mind settled into putting these plans into fruition.

It was thus that she did not hear it until it was too late. With a mighty crash and a great whining of smashed servitor and wall, a large black dreadnought stormed into her room, a flamer built into one hand and a gigantic piston driven hammer in the other. It began to burn the hateful icons from their places, and the last thing she heard before the voices in her head stopped forever was the low, bass intonation of

"Stop! You've Violated the Law."

When the hammer had finished its work, the inquisitorial party following the dreadnought felt a deep rumble of satisfaction from the engine. The machine tilted until the sarcophagus was almost level with the bloody smear on the chapel's stone floor.

"Serve your sentence. I will serve mine."


	3. 3 Denial of Faith

3 Denial of Faith

_998.M41, Fyracus IV_, _Segmentum Obscuras, Temple of the Omnissiah Machine Spirit Room 1_

A lone figure sat in the dark, chilled solitude of the Adeptus Mechanicus' most advanced computer system chamber within fifteen light years.

The temperature was actually somewhere near the freezing point of water, the humidity driven out of the air by ancient air condensers. Filling almost every space, racks of ancient machines blinked, hummed, and droned in Machine as they calculated any number of transactions across the sector's financial centre. The figure in the chair seated in front of a bank of access terminals breathed out slowly; a little cloud of breath escaped their lips and faded silently into the stillness of the room. Every now and then, the figure stirred ever so slightly, as if straining to discern within the constant drone of the room's machine spirits what they were listening for.

Inquisitor Alera Jumil waited, as she had been doing for the past seven hours. Her eyes were closed, her snow white hair oddly appropriate for her frosty surroundings. A data jack protruded from the back of her ear and into a data port near one of the control terminals. Only her breath gave any indication that she wasn't a frozen statue.

When one of the indicator lights flashed on the vast bank of machines lovingly maintained in the room, she was ready for it.

She tapped the communicator at her wrist.

* * *

Elsewhere in the facility, a man with a pilot's peaked cap and a Magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus waited patiently for their boss to call.

Of course, by "waiting patiently" they were looking at each other with mingled stares of jealousy, pent up resentment, and yearning. They weren't really looking at the myriad pieces of diagnostic machine equipment set up around them, plugged in and accessing the entire planetary computer network.

Ally Danar had almost all of her onboard cogitators working out the logical reasons behind her simmering resentment of her husband, in conjunction with her biological mind. She'd been running constant diagnostics on her brain's emotional state, which was, as of late, refusing to acknowledge him with the feelings of contentment, joy, and a significant dose of that embarrassing (especially to the Adeptus Mechanicus) sexual attraction that she'd gotten used to over the past eleven years. Normally, she would have put the diagnostics aside for later, but she'd _liked_ those feelings, and eleven years was a long time to have them as a constant companion.

She'd isolated it to one particular moment; that point in time when her similarity to someone he knew triggered a physiological reaction in him akin to surprise, acknowledgement, and a very serious sense of guilt. His pupils had dilated, his mouth gone dry, and his heart rate increased as adrenaline flowed through his body. She had thought it was arousal, but she couldn't detect any dopamine or the lovingly catalogued and archived pheromones coming off him whenever he looked at her like that.

He was showing classic symptoms of being _afraid_.

Of _her_.

The rational part of her brain had told her that his continued association and close proximity to a person whom he knew was more than capable of killing him with a flick of a mechandrite or even a well judged punch certainly wasn't in accord with a human afraid for his life. So her analysis had shifted. What aspect of that physiological reaction bothered her so much?

It was his reaction to _that woman_ which caused the fear.

Another part of her brain revolted at her emotions. She was a human, of course, and even if she'd undertaken the Rite of Pure Thought she could still have rationally understood the principles behind human mating biology. Jealousy and possessiveness were a very easy way for a mating pair to define their actions so as to prevent, as far as possible, their children not being theirs. But the Mechanicus way was logic. It had been almost literally beaten into her in her two hundred years since she was initiated into the mysteries. There was absolutely _no logical reason_ why she felt such heated jealousy. She had met him long after he had left the other woman, thinking she was dead. They had fallen in love. Gotten married. She was still sure, even after all these years, that her memory indexes of human attractiveness were still valid, and she was far, far more attractive than Raelin Clarinel had ever been.

So why she felt such emotions triggered a multitude of level 2 diagnostics amongst her onboard operating systems, which kept finding nothing wrong with her neural pathways and her kernel.

This was all done in the two second glance she had stolen his way, and she suddenly felt her mouth twitch up in a smile as her gaze lingered on him. Something of the old emotions came flooding back, and she grasped desperately for it even as it began to ebb away into the sourness she had been wallowing in lately.

Ally fumed mentally.

Now her subconscious biological brain was betraying her.

In a less methodic way, Garen Danar simmered in his shallowness.

He knew perfectly well why Ally was upset with him, and yet, for all he knew that, he resented it.

Was it really his fault that he had fallen in love with another woman long before he'd met her? Had thought he'd lost forever, long before he met her?

Was it somehow wrong for him to feel guilt about what might have been, knowing he had abandoned someone he loved to the Ruinous Gods of Chaos?

He thought about it for a while, even while he warily noted the smouldering look in Ally's eye.

He wondered what it would be like if he just flew planes and ships and shuttles, just as his family had taught him to do on the _Swift Justice_, the ship he'd called home for most of his life. The Captain would have been sure to give him an honourable discharge after his obligatory twenty years; after all, he'd known him since he was a child. Flying across the Emperor's glorious Imperium, bringing all sorts of wares to all the myriad planets that basked in the warmth of his astronomican.

He could see himself doing it. On his shuttle, without a care in the universe, with a cargo to carry and a letter of marque in his pocket.

He pictured a sweet, smiling young woman, in the habit of the Logos Communicator division of the Adepta Sororitas, in the seat next to him, checking their short range navigational tables, for navigators were too expensive for private operators, and so they'd have to travel the warp exceedingly carefully, in short bursts that were dwarfed by larger ships. It was an intoxicating dream.

Truth be told, it was a dream he'd entertained even before she'd asked him to take her away with him for an adventure that she was sure would be worth it, as long as they were together. He'd told her that she wouldn't be suited for the life in space, and she wasn't. She'd admitted it herself. But that wasn't the reason. It was a silly reason, for Garen knew many crew mates on his old ship that had grown up on the ground and adjusted well to the spacefarer's life. The only reason he said no…

The only reason he said no was that he didn't want her sitting in the co-pilot's seat, as much as he loved her. That in truth, as much as he loved her, he hadn't wanted her to share his life and his dream. And that, to him, seemed a betrayal of her trust that was only exacerbated by the horrors that the young woman had endured since.

He looked at Ally, and he thought to himself those same, dark thoughts.

After all, Garen Danar loved Ally Terenas just as much as he had loved Raelin Clarinel. And he wasn't sure he wouldn't abandon her again.

* * *

A hologram sprang up from the hololith emitter.

"Did you get the trace on the Denial of Service attack?" The Inquisitor asked.

"Yes, Ma'am," Ally replied, her voice level and neutral, making sure that her voice was just as her pre-recorded at rest voice parameters. She glanced at the readouts on the various consoles flanking her, now blurring in their speed as the computers logged every access attempt, now geometrically increasing to exceedingly numerous entries. She snatched a cable from a cogitator near her and with one deft movement, opened her scalp plate, exposing the universal machine interface set into her skull. She plugged it in and her mind could now read the veritable mountain of data at a speed even her enhanced eye couldn't match. "They're emanating from proxies. They seem to be coming from different addresses each time." Her normally sweet voice was twinged somewhat with disappointment.

"Frakking waste of time, then?" came the response, and the Magos sighed in agreement. "I told you I'd be better to wait in the control room rather than you," the Mechanicus engineer said.

The Inquisitor on the hololith image shrugged her shoulders. "No, I have my reasons. It's fine. Keep the logs. There might be something interesting if we trawl the data afterwards." The white haired woman with the dark features waited a moment. "I want another pair of eyes looking at the data as well. Please make sure Garen's looking at the files with you." The image projecting from the hololith faded out as Alera ended the communication.

Ally snorted slightly. She would have to read the data visually now, for Garen had never had even a machine interface installed into him, as Alera had. With a few quick keystrokes on the console in front of her, Ally projected from the hololith a gigantic glowing mass of data logs isolated from the Machine Spirits of the entire planet's financial databases.

She input a few more commands, and the mass began to brighten in parts as entries clearly meant only to take the server's time were highlighted by the system. They seemed utterly random, and for random durations. She began running a series of calculations designed to look for algorithms or patterns behind the entries, but nothing was flagging as a definite pattern.

Garen suddenly spoke up. "Ally, alter the table to eight rows." She did so, and the table collapsed and reformed as she worked the console. It still looked like a shapeless mass.

The pilot now began to input his own commands. Ally wasn't sure what he was doing, but it looked as if he was trying to make the time entries into a different dimension across the table, flattening them out, making the holographic display bulge out as entries began to be stacked not just above and below, but behind and in front.

Ally gasped. Now she knew what she was looking at.

In front of them was the pulsating representation of the eight pointed star of the Gods of Chaos.

"And there it is," he said, and with his last keystroke, they both looked down, and realized their hands were touching.

Ally's fingers almost instinctually intertwined itself into Garen's, as her enhanced strength let her have her way with him. And unlike every other time she had done it, she felt nothing but the ebbing away of that practical side of her brain as her emotional side began to take precedence again… free from the feelings that had previously poisoned it.

Garen took a deep breath… if for the only reason that he again realized just how pleasant it was to have Ally's hand in his.

The pair looked at each other again, and each began to feel the soft rush of emotions again, almost as if their physical touch had cancelled the rage simmering within both of them. That, and the joy in their team work.

It didn't completely banish the dark reveries they were both immersed in, but it did tell them something they had hoped hadn't changed in the meantime. They still knew how to act as a couple. How to _be_ a couple.

Ally and Garen sighed a soft sigh of relief and joy, almost at the same time. It had been harrowing keeping up appearances, and luckily the Inquisitor had not seemed to notice they had been on edge the past week. It was over now, and they could stop pretending for her sake that everything was fine, because it was fine again.

"It's a bit odd that she didn't notice, isn't it?" Garen asked suddenly, putting to words what both of them had thought. He put his fingers to his wife's neck, to the diamond Aquila necklace he'd given her a long time ago.

Ally almost shivered at the touch. "We just must be getting good at fooling her." She looked into her Fleshy Darling's eyes and smiled.

In a freezing room far away, filled only with computers, a lone figure grinned. It was nice when her team was working well together again.

* * *

Some time later, the inquisitor pressed a quick series of commands into a panel set next to the door of a rather large hangar.

Light strips across the room powered up slowly, illuminating a well kept and clean work space, with a large coffin shaped box resting plugged into some machinery set against one wall. Indicator lights on the box began to cycle, as a soft humming began to build from the machines.

Alera walked over to the box. "How's the entertainment on the _Starry Juniper_, Lena?" she asked the device.

A voxcoder set into it screeched a reply in Machine, the language of the Adeptus Mechanicus. "Daytime holovox received by the ship from the planet is unwatchable, just as I remember before taking novitiate orders," the sarcophagus said, clicking and clacking occasionally as the lights along the side flitted on and off. "I am glad you came to visit. The ship is quite empty."

Alera smiled ruefully. "It's not entirely a social call, I'm afraid." She punched a few commands into the console set into the box. A loud resonant tone acknowledged her commands, and a receiver set into the sarcophagus began to hum and warm up as it began to receive data piped in from the ship. Lena had once been a flesh and blood person, not too long ago at all. Now she was half woman and half machine, and quite honestly pretty content with her life.

It did help that when she wasn't interfacing with her Inquisitor's ship Machine Spirits and helping to run it, she piloted his Divine Majesty's Penitent Engine _Death to Traitors_. It wasn't too different from her life as one of his Divine Majesty's Adeptas Sororitas Militant.

The Inquisitor let the data stream flow. "But on that note, there. That's the entire collected entertainment tapes, holovids, books, and music my teams and I have collected over a century on the job." The Inquisitor paused for a moment. "I'm pretty sure Ally has a lot more collected because she's older than me by a good century or more, but she seems to appreciate ancient Earth material. Something she calls "Yaoi Lemon Slashfics." I've never read it myself, but you can ask her for it."

The box tooted an affirmative, pleased response.

Alera smiled. "Now, onto the work related conversation." She reached behind her neck, behind her ear, and found the hard plug of the machine interface implanted into her skull. With her other hand, she reached for the cable snaking out of the sarcophagus and brought it to her neck. With a satisfied click, Ally's mind suddenly felt the presence of intelligences around her, in her brain.

"All right," she said, still aloud, "I'm going to play you a log of the latest attack." She let the stream of data flowing through her mind to grow into a flood, and, compressed and packaged, played it sequentially to Lena. "You'll note that the Ruinous Powers always like to make my job easier, for which I am grateful, but not too grateful; they've made it a clear ritual of some sort."

The pulsating symbol of Chaos undivided now floated in her mind's eye. "So we clearly have a Chaos cult." She looked askance at one of the intelligences in her head, which to her looked like a comely woman, just on the cusp of middle age, a severe bob of hair on her head and the loose habit of the Adeptas Sororitas. "Any idea why?"

Lena seemed to frown, which Alera knew was just her subconscious trying to interpret the Machine impulses from the sarcophagus in front of her in ways her brain had never learned.

"I do not like the look of this at all, Inquisitor," the woman said, her voice here a warm, welcoming tone unaffected by the tinny squeak of her real voice encoded through vox. "There is one advantage, however," she said, and Alera nodded, for although she was, strictly speaking, an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor, she had spent her entire working career near the Eye of Terror, and knew of many of the ways the Ruinous Powers worked to spread heresy across the Imperium.

Alera spoke. "It's a big ritual, and easy enough for anyone clever enough to see it, but it's not quite out in the open yet."

The data visualization of Lena nodded. "They are seeking the favour of the Chaos Gods, and their attentions… but they do not think they would win an outright confrontation with us yet." Her image smiled, savagely. "Let us crush them."

"For which," the Inquisitor replied, "we have to work out where they are." She turned to another of the figures standing in her mind, a nondescript, metallic being with the outward appearance of a servitor. "What has the analysis shown you?"

The reply was in monotone. "Joint analysis between the combined processing cores of my brothers, sister Ally and I have yet found no correlation between the sources of the attacks." It paused. "Given the existence of publicly and commercially available tunneling programs and virtual private networks, it is impossible to determine with any precision the exact location of a source of a signal."

A worried frown appeared across the former Sister of Battle's face. "You mean that you do not know?"

"I don't. I was hoping you did."

Alera Jumil's heart began to sank as Lena's digitized expression told her all she needed to know.

* * *

Ally Danar tried and failed miserably to ward her husband's arms off her waist, gasped with surprise when his lips touched hers, laughed a happy peal of laughter than when she finally broke free of him, and tumbled gracefully backward in a flurry of robes when he pushed her roughly, yet oddly gently, onto the bed.

It was all a charade, of course, for Ally Danar could easily punch holes through ceramite carapace armour with one hand, and if she had wanted to, have deployed any number of gyrostabilizers, mechandrites, or artificial body parts to keep herself upright.

But she was still human, and there was some dark little part of her that enjoyed the sensations she was now feeling. She closed her eyes and sighed as her husband's hands began to rove over her body. It had been a long time since she'd felt like this. Such a long time, months now…

She didn't quite know when, so she had to confer with one of her cogitators, as to when the annoying sound of an incoming communication made one of her internal components whine in Machine. Judging from where it was coming from, it was probably her subscription to the local planetary news network.

_Could you shut it off?_ her mind told herself.

_Unable to comply. Local Planetary standard requires incoming communication protocol headers to be communicated in aural Machine._

_You are such a turn off,_ she told herself.

Her reply was tinged with a hint of mirth. _Affirmative_.

She suddenly realized she couldn't feel Garen's lips over her skin, and his hands were no longer moving. Ally opened her eyes, to see her husband looking curiously down at her.

"I'm sorry," she said, somewhat sheepishly.

"Oh no, it wasn't that," Garen said. "I swear I heard one of your cogitators receive a header file whispering something."

Ally's brow raised.

* * *

"Play it back," Alera said.

Ally sat in a chair, her head open and thick cables leading from her Universal Machine Interface into the bank of computers replaying the audio file her internal cogitators had picked up. Alera sat casually in a chair next to her, a cup of _Ulara _tea in her hand and a datapad in the other.

Ally had run her recording cogitators ragged playing and replaying the header file of that morning's nes transmission. In front of both of them, analyses and representations of the data and Machine it was spoken in danced on hololiths set into the combined research might of the planet's greatest mechanicus machine spirits.

"You know, Fleshy Darling has pretty good hearing to pick that up from behind the header file," Ally said, a tone of wonder, pride, and pleasure.

Underneath the jagged line of the audio pick up of Machine announcing the header was a tiny susurration of data. Another sneaking line played under the troughs made by the louder audio.

"You taught him Machine. You're a Magos. You've been teaching men and women for nearly two hundred years now how to speak machine. He couldn't have a better teacher." Alera Jumil smiled. "Didn't you pick it up?"

The Mechanicus engineer shrugged, her movements somewhat hampered by the cables protruding from her head. "The first time I separated the lines from each other, I magnified the line of data below. The Machine just sounds like gibberish. I didn't even pick up any cypher header files telling me if the data is being encrypted, and it doesn't relate to any cypher within the Omnissiah's grace." She pointed at the rather erratic nature of the data stream below the ordered grace of the header file on top. "In fact, it sounds a lot like standard interference. We hear that all the time due to environmental conditions."

The Inquisitor's brow raised, just so, when she heard this.

"Fascinating," she said.

"What?" Ally asked.

"Riddle me this," Alera said, taking a sip and closing her eyes in contemplation. "Clearly there's _something_ hidden in this data stream. It's hidden in a header file which a Mechanicus adept would dismiss as noise, it's in a language which almost no purebl... _Baseline_ human would understand, let alone speak, and it's hidden in a kind of file that is transmitted, in its _trillions_, every day on this planet."

The two sat in rather companionable silence for what seemed like a long time.

Alera's eyes suddenly flew open.

"Ally, get the logs for Machine Spirit Room 1 around the time you recorded this image."

The engineer's eyes grew wide in surprise and recognition. On the hololith in front of them, the depiction of audio analysis was replaced by a table of data that was beginning to form what Ally and Garen had found a scant day ago.

In Ally's mind, she suddenly felt a sharp pain, as the Machine Spirit protector programs of the great mainframe entered her mind, and felt the presence of... the unclean. _What?_ she told herself somewhat in surprise, as the programs indicated they wished to start purging work. It wasn't a huge deal; the mild discomfort while they rearranged her internal software to be free from bugs was not a huge ordeal. The only thing was that she had had a check up only a month ago, while she was still being rebuilt... what on Earth was unclean?

The pain ratcheted upward as her cogitators suddenly began to spout subroutines and processes she'd never set in motion in reaction to _something_ or other, programs hidden deep within buried and altered subroutines. She tried to move her hand to her manual override for her Machine interface, but now she felt like she was on fire.

Ally's entire body began to shake as anti-virus routines in the network went into full debugging and isolation mode, beginning to block off more and more blocks of data, shutting down her system while her human nervous system screamed in pain. "The information, in the header... I've had contact with it. With a tainted machine, singing to my machine self; _oh Frak, isolate me from the network now..."_

The Inquisitor's eyes glowed a bright blue, and the cables leading from Ally's head snapped off her machine interface, sparking as they were ripped from her brain.

Ally gurgled, and then her eyes rolled into the back of her head as she fainted from the pain, her physical body collapsing into a heap on the ground. Alera rushed to her old friend, putting her fingers to the engineer's throat and relieved that she could find a pulse. Her forehead was warm but not overheated. At least her biological parts were uninfected.

A soft warbling emanated from her Machine parts. It had nothing to compete with, so Alera could hear it clearly. Ally was right. It _was_ gibberish.

Whatever did "_ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_"mean?


End file.
